Home / Affiliate Content The growth of artificial intelligence, cloud services and data centers is rapidly increasing the volume of traffic between Europe and Asia. Against this background, Central Asia is increasingly being seen not just as a transit territory, but potentially as one of the key digital hubs of Eurasia. This was the subject of the Central Asia Transit Roundtable, which Huawei and the Carrier Community held in Almaty as part of the Global Carrier Community Meeting. Representatives of telecom operators and industry experts from China, Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan and Georgia gathered at one table. The discussion centered on the growth of cross-border traffic, the development of new backbone routes and the demands that the era of artificial intelligence places on network infrastructure. Wang Qi, vice president of Huawei for the Central Asia region, noted that today the region faces the challenge of turning its geographical advantage into a technological one. According to him, Central Asia can form a world-class digital corridor with low latency, high reliability and intelligent control. The scale of the opportunities is also confirmed by traffic growth forecasts. Andrey Beklemishev, vice
President of IDC for the CIS region, said that by 2030 international traffic between Europe and Asia could reach about 611 Tbit/s. This is more than 450 Tbps above the 2025 level. About 30% of this volume may pass through the Middle Corridor. This growth simultaneously opens up new opportunities for Central Asia and increases demands on capacity, latency, reliability and route diversity. One of the conditions for the competitiveness of the region, according to Beklemishev, should be common interfaces and standardized SLAs for international clients. This will allow operators to offer clearer and more competitive terms in the global market. Anton Rukavishnikov, technical director of TNS Global, also drew attention to the growing role of infrastructure. According to him, the development of AI, cloud services and data centers makes high throughput, network stability and the availability of alternative routes especially important. Today, TNS Global operates more than 14,500 kilometers of fiber optic network and more than 30 cross-border connections in five countries. The company continues to develop the East-West direction and new routes towards the Middle East, strengthening connectivity
t Central Asia with a global digital ecosystem. Another important infrastructure project was presented by Nurlan Meirmanov, Director of Information Technology of Kazakhtelecom JSC. We are talking about CaspiLink, a trans-Caspian submarine cable with a length of about 380 kilometers and a capacity of at least 400 Tbit/s. The commercial launch of the project is planned for the fourth quarter of 2026. It is expected that CaspiLink will allow diversification of routes between Europe and Asia and will further strengthen Kazakhstan’s position as a regional digital hub. In parallel, Kazakhstan is developing internal fiber-optic infrastructure and computing power for artificial intelligence. This is important not only for transit, but also for creating your own demand for cloud services, data centers and AI solutions. On the Chinese side, Ai Jinwan, Deputy General Director of the Eurasian region of China Unicom Global, indicated a similar interest in the development of new routes. The company uses global network infrastructure to organize high-speed and reliable connections between Asia and Europe and intends to expand cooperation with Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan and other countries in the region.
A separate part of the discussion was devoted to what the network should become in the era of AI. Gavin Gu, President of Huawei's Optical Transport Networks business, presented the concept of a next-generation all-optical network for Central Asia. The target architecture assumes latency of up to 25 ms when transferring data between Europe and Asia via Central Asia, up to 15 ms between national data centers and up to 1 ms when accessing regional data centers. As a technological basis, Huawei is developing AI-OTN, which combines two directions: OTN for AI and AI for OTN. This architecture is designed for high throughput, low latency, reliability, security and intelligent network management. As a result of the discussion, the participants agreed that the development of cloud services, data centers and AI computing will become one of the main drivers of regional traffic growth. However, it is no less important, according to the participants, to use the transit potential of Central Asia between Europe, Asia and the Middle East. “Land routes along the Silk Road are already becoming an important complement to submarine cables and the Northern Route. Against this background, Central Asia has the opportunity to claim not only
the role of a transit link, but also the status of a full-fledged digital hub of Eurasia,” the experts summed up the discussion with this thesis.
